Topic: Righteousness + Force in America: The Trap of Activism Coupled with Power (Read 19 times)

There are two ways of getting things done: persuasion or coercion. You either convince someone of the value of your ideas or you hold a (literal or metaphorical) gun to their head. The latter has been the norm throughout human history. Most of what we value about the contemporary West is a shift toward the former occurring over the last 250 years or so.

However, there’s an important difference between the despotisms of old and coercive governments in the modern era: modern-day tyrants frame themselves as the righteous side in any conflict.

Think about it: Ancient Persian Emperors and the German Kaiser didn’t paint themselves as the moral superiors of their enemies. They simply wanted their stuff and, if they could, they took it. In contrast, during the American Civil War or the Allied cause during World War II, force didn’t justify itself. Instead, force was justified by the righteousness of the cause.

(President Lincoln openly, repeatedly stated more than a year into the Civil War that his call to "end slavery" was a useful means by which to justify his real objective: To preserve the Union.)

The need to justify force with righteousness is not limited to wartime. Every new coercive law or regulation is justified not on the basis of “I’m strong enough to take your stuff and so I think I will,” but because “our cause is just.” While some who would take your freedom or your life are motivated by their desire for power, the most vicious monsters in human history were all motivated by righteousness. They seek to perfect creation, no matter what the cost, rather than simply acquire power for its own end - a philosophically important distinction.

It is this philosophy of using state power to impose one's morality on others that in part has made American politics such a bloodsport nowadays. If you follow the thread from the Abolitionist movement (which provided moral justification for the Union's invasion of the Confederacy) through the Temperance movement (which culminated in Prohibition) to the Progressivism movement as we detail below, you'll see why.

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